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by VyseofArcadia 1102 days ago
But a "critical security vulnerability " depends on the use. My daily driver? Yes, I want all of the security updates. A raspberry pi for playing arcade games that I occasionally scp a ROM over to? I really don't care if someone hacks in.

We, as an industry, are bad about pushing "every device that is on the internet needs to be as up to date as possible all the time" when it reality there is a lot of unimportant stuff on the internet.

It's like locks. I wouldn't secure my house with a bike lock, but it's fine for my bike. My bike is less full of important stuff.

3 comments

> I really don't care if someone hacks in.

At best, that means you're externalizing the costs, i.e. now your device is part of a botnet and becomes a problem for other people. But of course that assumes that it doesn't become a problem for you as well; a compromised device on your network is a great launching point for local attacks and a way to send illegal traffic out through your internet connection.

I'm reminded of the aquarium thermometer used to launch an attach on a casino. <https://mashable.com/article/casino-smart-thermometer-hacked>

I have a couple Raspberry Pi Zeroes that monitor aquarium temperature. I keep them updated.

Ah yeah, I need to stop working at random notice, because some CVE bros have to immediately update all my things to hedge the risk of organized crime targeting my $0 value data like I'm that casino.

Meanwhile in reality, no one gives a f about the rPi you use for your Guinea pig feeder.

The "security" industry is unfortunately full of corpo-authoritarians. Once they realised a lot of the population can be forced to do anything if they can be convinced it's for "security", they've been doubling down on that.
Well, a common thing with open computing resources these days is cryptominers. Sure, you don't care about updates, until someone puts a miner on it and you have to go in and try to fix it. It wouldn't matter that your single device doesn't have enough processing power when there are tens of thousands of similarly vulnerable devices to hijack.